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Americans Behind the Barbed Wire
World War Two Inside a German Prison Camp
by J. Frank Diggs

ISBN 978-0-918339-52-2
Hardcover | 208 pages  6 x 9 |Illustrated | Acid Free Paper | Index * $24.95

… This factual story serves to illustrate the dedication, loyalty, and willingness to accept hardships and danger for their country that Tom Brokaw has described as "The Greatest Generation." Frank tells us why that is a deserved description.
Senator John Glenn

The author has performed an outstanding job by combining his unique journalistic talent and his own personal experiences to provide the reader with a very realistic view of the hazards, hardships, and conditions of military conflict.
Lt. Gen. Thomas H. Miller, USMC, (ret.)

His account of life as a prisoner of war in WWII is both literate and inspiring; a tribute to the American POWs of that war.
Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Senior Military Historian (ret.)
U.S. Army Center for Military History

This inspirational book provides a firsthand look at the remarkable men who served with bravery as prisoners of the Germans in WWII and fought to reclaim the world's freedom.
Senator John McCain

For participants, war is never a pleasant experience. Arguably there are, however, better and worse places to be during a war. One of the worst views of war comes from those unfortunates who find themselves captured by the enemy and forced to spend the balance of he war in a POW camp. In Americans Behind the Barbed Wire, journalist J. Frank Diggs, then an infantry lieutenant in the US Army, shares with readers this unique view of WWII from inside Oflag 64, a German POW camp located in Schubin, Poland.

The author, representative of a generation of Americans who were tempered to hardships during the Great Depression, takes the reader on a complex journey from combat, to capture, to prison, and finally to escape and repatriation. He and his fellow kriegies, German slang for prisoners, demonstrate a resoluteness and sense of purpose, shared by his generation and largely unknown today. As kriegies they worked and plotted for more food, searched for more heat and warm clothes, worked to improve themselves and their condition, established a camp newspaper to help improve the flow of information and relieve the mind-numbing boredom, and never stopped working for their freedom. This truly amazing book offers a glimpse of history that never made headlines, but was just as real as aerial bombing, submarine warfare, and amphibious landings. The last portion of the book includes a diary of the author’s escape from the Germans, his encounter with the advancing Russians, his subsequent hitchhiking across Poland to Warsaw, his travel by boxcar across Russia to Odessa, his involvement in the Russian/American repatriation crises at the end of the war, and his eventual return to the United States.